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I am in the progress to write a shell script to check my alert log for an Oracle database 816 on Solaris. The script will be placed on cron job and check the Oracle alert log every 5 minutes. If any new ORA- error comes up, it will send me an email. Does anybody have any tips or techniques for this? Thank you!

Righ now, I am thinking something like:

cat alert_dbprod.log|grep ORA

Questions are:

How do I avoid scaning the log from the very first line everytime? The alert log is purged and "refreshed" every quarter.

What are the searching patterns that I need to use? Only "ORA-"? Are there any other patterns I need to catch and send emails for DBAs to look?